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bIn 2004, video games were already in their teens. The war between Sega and Nintendo that defined the early 1990s was in the rearview mirror: the PlayStation had taken them both down, and Microsoft had launched the Xbox. The commercial and critical hits of the day were not cartoon platformers, but operatic space shooters (Halo) and anarchic crime games (Grand Theft Auto). There were a lot of weapons and most games adopted increasingly cinematic scenes.
Meanwhile, Nintendo had fallen to third place with its Game Cube home console, but still dominated the portable gaming market with the Game Boy Advance. Everyone was waiting for the next version of the Game Boy family. But instead, Nintendo released a strange-looking silver console that was controlled with a stylus.
The Nintendo DS turns 20 this month. Despite its strange appearance and unconventional controls, it was Nintendo’s biggest hit, selling more than 150 million units. It was not only aimed at people who wanted to play Mario on the go, but also at those who had never thought about purchasing a video game console before. Intuitive touchscreen controls opened video games to millions more people than the Game Boy had ever been able to reach. On the DS, you can play sudoku, language learning games, and raise virtual pets. Many people bought it not because of Pokémon but because of Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training.
The idea of a dual-screen console had been floating around Nintendo for a while. It was an idea that Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo’s president from 1949 to 2002, was especially fond of, and he often mentioned it to his successor, Satoru Iwata, and Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s creative leader. As Iwata said: “The demand to do something with two screens had been with us for a while, a persistent source of motivation, to the point where Miyamoto and I basically reverse-engineered it.”
Iwata always believed in the idea, but the markets and the public received the DS with enormous skepticism. “At first a lot of people were confused,” he recalls. “When we announced, ‘We’re going to release a console that has two screens and a touchpad,’ most people must have thought Nintendo had gone crazy.”
In retrospect, the Nintendo DS prepared the world for the iPhone and for the explosion of touchscreen smartphone gaming that would eventually kill off the idea of a handheld game console. We no longer need them now that we have a device that fits in our pockets and can do everything from giving us directions and taking pictures to playing games. The DS was halfway between the Game Boy and the smartphone: a device that played games but could also do other things.
I was there for the games, of course. When I bought my DS, no one knew that it would greatly expand the gaming population. And it had some tremendous games, including many weird and wonderful ones. The DS’s new control method seemed to inspire developers to do all kinds of fun and unexpected things. Touchscreen control was this console’s most enduring innovation, but the DS’s dual-screen deck is surprisingly adaptable and lends itself to many uses.
Brain Training had you hold the console sideways like a book, typing answers to simple math and logic questions on the touchscreen. The puzzles in the adventure game Another Code required you to open and close the DS to seal documents or tilt the screens to mirror each other to decipher a symbol. In Electroplankton you draw paths for small musical organisms. There was even a Guitar Hero game that came with a small attachable fingerboard and pick. In the DS Zelda game Phantom Hourglass, you have to yell at a character through the microphone to lower a bridge for you. You can also talk to your Nintendog.
More than anything, the DS inspired variety. I have a huge collection of DS games ranging from unexpectedly harrowing desert island simulators (Lost in blue) and the 3-on-3 basketball game Mario Hoops to rhythm games and visual novels (the gritty and heartfelt legal drama series Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney has never been better than on the DS). Their bestsellers include, unsurprisingly, New Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart, but also Brain Training, Nintendogs and Professor Layton (a charming puzzle game about an English teacher and his protégé son). Their catalog was anything but homogeneous.
The 3DS, released in 2011, was a worthy successor with its own great lineup, but by then smartphones had already dealt a mortal blow to the portable gaming console and the industry was becoming more conservative. The kind of broad, open-ended experimentation that defined the DS catalog would never be seen again. The DS will be remembered in the world as the console that pioneered touch screen control, but for me it will always be the console with the most eclectic selection of games in history.
what to play
The most obvious DS classic picks are Mario Kart, advanced warfares: Double hit, nintendogs (not @me) and Animal Crossing: Wild World. But since when have I served you the obvious?
Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan (called elite agents outside of Japan), is the perfect encapsulation of this experimental era in portable game design. It’s an interactive musical opera-manga in which you take control of a team of cheerleaders to help people in times of conflict in their lives, with a soundtrack of huge J-pop melodies. You use the stylus to tap and swipe to the music, leading the cheerleading team to help a potter rediscover his muse, a schoolboy pass his exams, and a ghost tells his still-living wife that he loves her. There are strollers on eBay for under £15.
Available in: nintendo ds
Estimated playing time: 4 of the best hours of your life
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what to read
He grandmother The nominees for best video game soundtrack have been announced. They are: Avatar: Pandora’s Borders; God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla; Marvel’s Spider-Man 2; Star Wars Outlaws; and Sorcery: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. We recently featured the people behind the music of Star Wars Outlaws in our High Scores video game music column.
Deadline reports that the stars of the excellent Amazon Prime radioactive dust The television adaptation will be will join Macaulay Culkin next seasonas “a mad genius type character.”
sony and nintendo announced This week’s quarterly financial results. The highlight on the PlayStation side: Sony has sold 65 million units of the PS5 and 1.5 million of the charming Astro Bot. On Nintendo’s side: it has already sold 146 million Switch consoles, a figure that is still well below the DS (154 million) as Nintendo’s best-selling console to date.
Nintendo’s next console will be backward compatible with Change games, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa confirmed at a press conference. More details on the new machine will come before the end of this financial year.
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Question Block
Reader Machine gun ask:
“I love playing mobile games of all kinds, but the one I play most often is a Puzzle Bobble/break a move imitator that I use to mislead without thinkingstress after a long day (I’m at level 5,264). The only problem with these games is the endless barrage of confusing, long, and strange ads. Do you have any suggestions for solid, well-designed, free puzzle games that will keep me from doomscrolling?
Unfortunately, the price of free games on your phone is almost Invariably, horrible ads. My first thought is: do you have a netflix subscription? It comes with a ton of smartphone games, some of which are very good puzzles: Monument Valley, Paper Trail, Arranger, Cut the Rope, and a variety of engaging and mindless word and match-3 games.
I also asked the good people at Bluesky to give your opinionand here are the recommendations that returned (thanks everyone): Slice & Dice, Konami’s Pixel Puzzle Collection, Township, Threes, Match Factory. and twenty. One developer highlighted its game, Vectic Lite, which has ads that can be ignored, along with another puzzle game with exclusive ads called Nokama. There is also an independent puzzle games website, thinking gameswhich allows you to search for recommendations in its database.
If you have a question for the ask block, or anything else to say about the newsletter, hit reply or email us at pushbuttons@theguardian.com.